The Eastland was one of the newer ships gathered at the docks that day and would be one of the first to depart, so it was natural that many of the picnickers would try to get on board. Rumors had circulated among the steamship lines that the Eastland was top-heavy and less than stable, but those rumors were disregarded as passengers began to stream aboard at 6:40 a.m. Only one minute later, the ship began to list starboard, toward the docks. The listing did not overly concern the ship’s chief engineer, Joseph Erickson, since it was an expected result of the passengers boarding from that side of the ship. Still, he ordered the ballast tanks on the port side to be filled in order to level the ship. As more passengers crowded on board, the ship began to list to the port side, where many people had congregated to watch the other ships boarding and to listen to a band aboard the nearby Theodore Roosevelt play “I’m on My Way to Dear Old Dublin Bay.” The Eastland crew continued to manipulate the ballast tanks to stabilize the vessel, but still there was no sense of impending danger.
The ship continued to sway back and forth, some of the passengers joking about it as loose objects slid along the deck. Water began entering the Eastland on the lower port side. The gangplank had been removed on the overcrowded ship, which now held more than twenty-five hundred passengers. More passengers moved to the port side, increasing the list to forty-five degrees. The crew began to worry and started to move some of the passengers to the starboard side. Water continued to enter the ship from below. Chairs, picnic baskets, and other items fell over and slid across the deck. Passengers below deck began climbing out of gangways and windows on the starboard side as the ship continued to lean toward port. The passengers panicked. They tried to find purchase somewhere on the tilting deck, while those below scrambled to make it topside before the ship keeled over. The ship continued to list dangerously to port. Before the eyes of hundreds of horrified spectators on nearby streets and docks, the Eastland slowly rolled over onto its port side.
The body of a woman being recovered from the Eastland.
Many passengers were pitched into the Chicago River, where, encumbered by suits and long dresses they were pulled below the water. Many more were trapped below, where they drowned. The thick smoke that filled the ship when some of its machinery exploded killed some. Lucky survivors managed to climb onto the hull of the ship while others were pulled from the river by rescuers in boats and even by onlookers who jumped into the river to save the floundering passengers. Others struggled to stay afloat and clung to whatever floating debris they could find.
Police and firemen and other rescuers climbed onto the hull of the Eastland, where they cut holes in the metal plate to bring up the survivors and the dead. Screams echoed all around them from the river and those trapped below deck. They worked frantically to free those inside but the screams gradually diminished even as they worked. By 8 a.m. all the survivors had been rescued, but 844 bodies were pulled from the ship and the river.
The scene was like something from Dante’s Inferno. One witness, a Chicagoan named Gretchen Krohn, described what it looked like dockside: “Up the slippery wet side canvas was spread that those carrying out the bodies might bring out their gruesome freight at a dog trot and thus empty the overturned basketful of human beings more quickly. All of the bodies carried past were so rigid that poles to carry them seemed superfluous. And the pitiful shortness of most of them! Children, and yet more children. And when it wasn’t a child, it was a young girl of eighteen or so.”
Another survivor said that the sight of so many babies floating on the water caused him to lose his belief in God.
The Second Regiment Armory on Washington Boulevard was pressed into service as a temporary morgue. The bodies of the victims were transported there to await identification by next of kin. The bodies were laid out in rows of eighty-five. It took several heart-rending days for all of them to be finally identified and claimed.
Today, the original armory building is incorporated into Harpo Studios, which produces the Oprah Winfrey Show. It is said that the ghosts of the Eastland victims are not at peace in the building. According to Chicago ghosthunter Dale Kaczmarek, one common apparition is the Lady in Gray, the shadowy figure of a woman in a long, flowing dress and ornate hat who is seen drifting through the halls. Supposedly, her image has even been captured on the building’s security monitors. In addition to the Lady in Gray, studio employees and security guards have reported hearing crying, the laughter of children, and old-time music. The footsteps of crowds of invisible people are heard going up and down the lobby staircase, accompanied by opening and slamming doors.
Another location that ghosts of the Eastland are rumored to haunt is Excalibur, a nightclub housed in the Romanesque-style brick building originally constructed for the Chicago Historical Society in 1892. Some people think that Eastland victims were also brought to the Historical Society, as well as the armory, although Dale Kaczmarek could find no evidence of that taking place. Still, something strange is going on at Excalibur. The events were first noticed in 1985, when a previous nightclub, Limelight, opened in the building. Glasses would fall over and break without anyone being near them and other objects would fall over as well. The balls on the pool table would roll around apparently of their own volition, as if some unseen pool players were enjoying a game.
Excalibur nightclub
In 1997, a segment of the television show Sightings was filmed at Excalibur featuring host Tim White, a local ghosthunter, and a psychic. The psychic heard a child’s voice say, “Stop and watch me.” Excalibur employees have heard small voices, like children, crying and have seen a little girl looking over the railing in the club’s Dome Room. Adult figures have been seen in the club as well, including a white-tuxedoed figure and a bluish-colored shape that floated up the stairs. We will probably never know if these ghosts are connected to the Eastland disaster, but whether they are or not, they add more interest to an already fascinating and macabre story.
Glessner House
CHICAGO
THE FIRST THING KERRY*, THE YOUNG DOCENT at Glessner House told me as we stood in the courtyard behind the building, was that I could not use his real name in my story. According to the folks at the Prairie Avenue House Museums, the nonprofit organization that operates and maintains Glessner House and two other historic homes in the Prairie Avenue Historic District—and the same folks who sign Kerry’s paycheck—the 1887 mansion is absolutely not haunted.
That’s not what Kerry says.
While my wife, Mary, rested on a bench before Glessner House, waiting for the official tour to begin, I walked through the mansion’s porte-cochere and wandered around to the courtyard. Glessner House sits at the corner of Prairie Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Its exterior is made of rugged, rough-hewn stone with Romanesque elements and the steeply pitched gable roof is made of red tile. The mansion looks like a fortress and, indeed, that is what the Glessner family’s snobby neighbors called it after the house had been completed.
The rear of the mansion, however, sports a much different style. The famed architect Henry Hobson Richardson designed the house and it was his intent to design the courtyard and rear of the house as a comfortable refuge from the busy street. Here, the walls are faced with pinkish brick trimmed at the lintels and sills with cream-colored limestone. Unlike the severe planes of the mansion’s street-side façade, three turrets projecting into the courtyard punctuate the rear of the building. All the rooms inside the four-story mansion are oriented toward the landscaped courtyard and large windows open out to it.